May 17, 2004
Beach
Went to the beach for the first time this year. (Even though it's only 15 minutes walk away, you (I, anyway) can get used to, and thus ignore, anything that's familiar. Beaches are sort of boring anyway, unless you're really in the right mood.)
The superlatively clear sunlight here gives everything in the middle-distance a flat, even quality, like images on a lightbox, or a cinema projection, it's as if there's no air between you and the horizon, nothing but crystal clear, pure space.
The overnight passage of the seawater over the sand had created a salt-crust that cracked and crumbled when touched, like a thin sliver of meringue.
All over the beach are immense rocks, some upended so that their geological time-lines read sideways, cryptolithic barcodes describing millenia of slow pressings and foldings, baker transformations encyphering the history of the earth.
Somewhere in here I was born - and there I died. It was only a moment for you. You took no notice.
The uneven cracks that transect and section the massive hunks of rock recall the thin surfaces of fat in a marbled lump of meat; I imagine them as the butchered remains of a gigantic granite behemoth, waiting to be forked up into Triton's maw.
In the centre of the beach there's the wreck of the Alacrity which foundered on the rocks in 1963 and which the Navy thought it prudent, rather than removing wholesale, to dynamite into smaller fragments upon which one or two swimmers a year forevermore will lacerate their lower limbs. Depending on the weather, large pieces of rusty metal rise up from the sands and then are covered again. Chunks sometimes free themselves from the bed and wash up on the shore, looking fierce. At the moment you can see the shape of the deeply-embedded prow quite clearly, right in the centre of the beach.
Roasted and stupefied by solar superfluity, we retreated toward the cliff in stages before the languorous thrust of the waves. At the other end of the beach, children shrieked in that apparently universally-standardised way they always do on beaches, like one of the comically repetitive sound effects in Mr Hulot's Holiday.
On the way up the steep cliff walk that seems four times as long on the way back, a red lizard scampered off the path in front of me, on the periphery of my vision, before I could properly see it.
Posted by robin at May 17, 2004 12:02 AM
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